amusement. “How do I close the door?”
“Door?” asked Vergillia.
Stilicho said, “Do not worry about your possessions.
With a few exceptions such as yourself, all noncitizens allowed into Deimos are rigidly programmed. There is no theft here.”
“I meant for privacy.”
“Privacy?”
Shaking her head wearily, Rebel said, “Listen, it’s been fun. Thanks for your help. Now why don’t you two just leave me alone for a while?” She sat down in the sleeping space. The rock smelled faintly of olive oil and machine lubricant. “Go away.”
“Perhaps,” Stilicho said in a concerned voice, “you don’t understand how badly new citizens are needed for the great task—”
“My mother was a citizen,” Rebel said angrily. “Did you know that?”
They looked at her.
“Yeah, she was born right here on Deimos. She was brought up in one of your creche collectives. Took citizenship at age ten. Did everything she was supposed to do, and got reprogrammed once a year. She was just like you, you know that?”
“I don’t—”
But Rebel talked through the reply, driven by a near-hysteria born of exhaustion. “Here’s the interesting part. She was on an ice asteroid seeding crew, just like you want me for, okay? She was on the green team, so she was in on it from the beginning. Went to Saturn orbital and was on the team that negotiated the deal with the ice butchers.” The citizens were staring at her in flat amazement. “So she was your quintessential constant citizen, right? Only it’s—what?— maybe a two-year trek from Saturn to Mars, even with early acceleration and a solar sail rig. So there was time for personality drift. The green team stavka thought there wasn’t enough opportunity for unshared experience for individualization to occur. So they weren’t vigilant enough.
“Okay, so the asteroid is passing through the belts, and there’s an unscheduled breakdown. Kills half the green team. The big tunneler needs parts and a major overhaul from the nearest industrial Kluster. My mother is on the buying collective, makes the score, returns.
“One of the fitters the Kluster sent out was my father. He was a big guy, very competent, sure of himself, quiet. A
hell of a guy. The kind that people admire. And my mother fell in love with him. You see that? She didn’t know what was happening at first, ’cause citizens don’t fall in love, right? How could they? By the time she realized what had happened, she was so far gone she didn’t want to come back. He smiled at her, and she went with him. Back at the Kluster, she took industrial asylum, and the green team had to go on without her.” Rebel’s throat was dry. She coughed into her hand. “So you see what I’m saying? I know all about you. I heard all about your tricks when I was a kid. I know what you’re selling, and I’m not buying any. Okay?”
Stilicho turned stiffly and bounded away. Vergillia hesitated long enough to say, “I am sorry that your mother was a sex-criminal and deprived you of your birthright.
But that does not excuse you for rudeness.”
Then she too was gone.
The stone was cool under Rebel’s back and vibrated with the subsonic rumble of faraway digging machines. Her stomach was queasy, and her head ached. Eucrasia’s memories had come back to her totally. There was much in Eucrasia’s past that she hadn’t had occasion to think about, but it was all there, and accessible to her.
But along with the dread weight of Eucrasia’s memories came unexpected insight. She realized now why her mother had filled her childhood with pointless droning stories about the corridors of Deimos, about quiet misery and bleak sameness and unending work. She understood her mother’s sudden flares of dark anger, her randomly-applied prohibitions, her sourceless punishments. They had all been her faltering, uninformed attempts to immunize Eucrasia against People’s Mars. To foster a hard independence that would ensure she never returned to the moon of her mother’s birth, never surrendered to its citizenship program.
And yet here she was, in these same tired old tunnels.
This is not my past, Rebel thought. This guilt is not mine.
And yet lying in this doorless niche, with citizens moving briskly by and occasionally glancing in with cool impersonal curiosity, the coughs and growls of distant machines bouncing down stone walls, Rebel felt like crying.
After a while, she did.
The clamor of voices echoed about the communal dining hall. The chamber was huge, as high as it was wide, and the hundreds of tables and benches and thousands of diners didn’t come near to filling it. High over Rebel’s place an enormous conduit gaped, water stains trailing from its lip. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the distantentryway, wondering how many here would make it to the nearest failsafe lock were that distant citizen-comptroller to suffer a single instant’s inattention.
Scattered here and there among the grey citizens, conversing, were several hundred orange Comprise (and one silent one who studied Rebel with dead insectoid stare) and the rarer multicolored brightness of Constance’s work crew. The chatter was light, and there was constant motion between tables. Wyeth slipped into the bench holes beside her. “How was your day?” Rebel asked.
“We managed to empty out the orchid, anyway.” A
pierrot set a tray before Wyeth, and he picked up the food tongs. “It was awful. I spent all my time keeping Little Miss Bloodthirsty from killing people. She wanted to give the orchid villagers an hour’s notice and then pump out the air.”
“No!”
“What is so remarkable?” Rosebuds latched her tray to the table and took the place beside Wyeth. Freeboy and a noncitizen Rebel didn’t recognize—he wore a zebra-striped cloak and a red vest with twin rows of brass buttons—took places opposite her. “Share it with us all.”
“A private joke,” Wyeth said easily. “Hallo, Freeboy.
Who’s your friend?”
“Bors is my name, sir.” Flash of white teeth. Bors’ hair was done up in long, thin braids, their ends contained in silver static balls. He wore a slim, noncommittal line of yellow paint across his brow. “I am a commercial traveler in vintage information from the Republique Provisionnelle d’Amalthea, of the unaligned Jovian satellites.”
Wyeth introduced himself and Rebel, and then said,
“You’ve come a long way.”
“And a long way yet to go. My coldship is bound for Earth in another day. Deimos is only a side-trip for me, a bit of mining technology transfer that was too profitable to resist.”
Freeboy, who had been listening impatiently, abruptly leaned forward and said to Rebel, “Hey! You’ll never guess who’s taken on citizenship today. You want to try and guess?” Confused, Rebel shook her head. Freeboy leaned back, looking smug. “Your little friend Maxwell, that’s who.”
“Maxwell?” Rebel said. Freeboy nodded. “Slim, dark, irresponsible, hedonistic kid? Are we talking about the same guy?”
“It does seem hard to credit,” Wyeth said. “This was voluntary, you say?”
“Oh yeah, he wanted it all right. He said—”
“This is all very interesting,” Rosebuds said. “Now I have something I’d like you all to see.” She slid her tray aside and started dealing out cards from a deck of holographic flats. She laid down an image of Mars as it appeared in prehuman times, red and lifeless, then covered it with a second card. The planet wavered, then blurred with storms. The icecaps were darkened by a light dustfall of Phobic matter, and shrank. A single glint of green showed within the crater of Olympus Mons. “You see the progress we’re making. The Olympus eden is a showcase microecology, a sample of what all Mars will be like eventually, and is not yet available for colonization.”
Swiftly she laid down further cards. “Fifty years from now, a hundred, one fifty. At this point most of the permafrost has melted, and the atmosphere is thick enough for humans equipped with rebreathers. But we will not be satisfied. Two hundred years.” Mottled green covered the floating sphere. There were thin clouds. “Three hundred.”